But I was glad that there was another copy of The Captive left. I love even that wicked editor now. * * * * * --All that was a day and a half ago. I am not so happy now, but I am very calm. I have found my righteousness again, and I can take whatever comes. And tasks in hours of insight willed Can be in hours of gloom fulfilled! * * * * * June 3d. I have now three days more to wait, to learn if The Captive is accepted. I have money enough to last me till then. If it is not accepted I should obviously have to starve, should I not? For I will never serve the world again. And am I a sheep that must be driven? No, I shall find a quicker way of dying than by starvation. In the meanwhile I live my life and say my prayer. * * * * * I have thought a great deal about the thing, and it seems by no means best for the world that it should treat all the men who have my gift as it has treated me. Let the world take notice that I perish because I have not cheap qualities. Because I was born to sing and to worship! Because I have no alloy, because I will not compromise, because I do not understand the world, and do not serve its uses! If I only knew all the book-gossip of the hour, and all the platitudes of the reviews! If only I knew anything of all the infinite frivolity and puerility that occupies the minds of men! But I do not, and so I am an outcast, and must work as a day laborer for my bread. --The infinite irrationality of it seems to me notable. Why, upon the men of genius of the _past_ you feed your lives, you blind and foolish men! They are the bread and meat of your souls--they make your civilizations--they mold your thoughts--they put into you all that little life which you have. And your reviews have use enough for _them_! Your publishers publish enough of _them_! _But what thoughts have you about the NEW teacher, the NEW inspirer?_ The madness of the thing! I read books enough, it seems to me, telling of the sufferings of the poets of a century ago!--of the indifference of the critics, the blindness of the public, of a century ago. And those things pain you all so cruelly! But the possibility of their happening to the poets of the _present_--it never seems to enter into your heads! Why, that very man who sent me back his curt refusal by his secretary--he writes about the agonies of Shelley and Keats in a way that brings the tears into your eyes! And that is only one example among thousands. What do these men think? Is it their idea that the public and the critics are now so true and so eager that the poets have nothing more to fear? That stupidity and blindness and indifference are quite entirely gone out of the world? That aspiration and fervor are now so much the rule that the least penny-a-liner can judge the new poet?